Articles by Alex Cruickshank

Laws on making backup copies of DVD movies vary throughout the world, but whenever film studios come up with a new form of copy protection for their discs, you can bet that software companies will do their best to crack it. And that’s the case with WinX DVD Ripper Platinum, a relatively small (8MB) application…

I’m not going to begin this review by telling you how important it is to carry out regular backups of your data. If you’re reading this you already know that, probably through personal experience of data loss. We’ve reviewed several incarnations of Acronis’ True Image Home product, most recently last year’s 2009 version. The 2010…

External hard drives are cheap these days, but they are also fragile. Spill coffee on them or set fire to them (bear with us) and the chances are you’ll have real trouble – and expense – recovering any of your valuable data without expensive forensic help. The same applies to data stored on laptops or…

One of the hassles involved in running a small to medium sized enterprise is managing the software that your employees use to go about their daily tasks. Leaving aside word processors and spreadsheet applications for a moment, the one set of tools that pretty much every business requires is centred on communication: e-mail, contacts, calendar…

We’ve been reviewing drive imaging software on IT Reviews since this site was launched. In fact the first ever software review was of this type of product. Imaging tools are handy because you don’t have to worry about individual data and application files. With a few clicks the entire contents of your hard drive –…

DVD ripping (the conversion of films from DVD format into another format) is a popular topic, but it’s bit of a grey area. Lawyers for film companies will tell you that it’s copyright theft, plain and simple, but common sense says that if you own a DVD of a film, converting that film into another…

There’s a tendency among some laptop reviewers to judge products by their price. In some cases this is justified, since market forces dictate that cheaper products are usually cheaper for a reason: they may use cheaper components or have fewer features than their more expensive counterparts. But sometimes laptops – like many other things in…

Painless partitioning of hard drives is something that appeals to the nerd in this reviewer, but it also has practical applications for both home and business users. Dumping all your applications and data on the same drive letter as your operating system, which is the norm for most new PCs, is inefficient and untidy. When…

It’s easy to get blasé about projectors, especially now that they are so commonplace in homes and offices. But we’ve reviewed many projectors over the years, and they are definitely not all created equal. Some are noisy, some suffer from ghosting, others have brightness inconsistencies, and so on and so forth. Generally we find, as…

An editorial on this site predicted that in order for the Linux operating system to become truly useful to people like the editor, it would inevitably have to become bloated. That prediction, while it may still hold true for some of the mainstream Linux distros, is looking rather shaky thanks to two recent projects that…